FENDER BRAND PROFILE Brand of brothers
Fender’s amp offering has a difficult balancing act, maintaining tradition while utilising technology. Gary Cooper crosses the high wire from budget to boutique with Shane Nicholas supplying the safety net…
Who wouldn’t want to be associated with every step in the development of popular music from the late 1940s to today – especially now that anything retro gets double points? Yet, from a marketing point of view, heritage can be a difficult mistress. Customers dare you to tamper with their dreams, while others drift away when your rivals, perhaps unencumbered by having a past to live up to, can claim to have created the future. How do you keep both camps satisfied? It’s a challenge Fender has risen to
O admirably in recent years, simultaneously
wning a collection of icons that would outshine a Russian museum sounds like a manufacturer’s dream.
Shane Nicholas (above) is Fender’s senior product manager for guitar amps
mining its history for mouth-watering revisits to the well of rock n roll with reissue Twins Reverb, Bassman and Princeton amps, gently tweaking revered models from the past with its Vintage Modified delights like the Band-Master and the Deluxe, while simultaneously pushing on to new horizons with products such as the G-Dec 3 amps – offering as up-to-the-minute modelling as you’ll find anywhere. The man charged with keeping all these plates spinning at the same time is Shane Nicholas, Fender’s senior product manager for guitar amplifiers. Based at the Fender HQ in Scottsdale, Arizona, Nicholas spoke to MI Pro just after the recent NAMM show, at which the company once again demonstrated its ability to
hit the right note with the launch of its Mustang solid state range – cunningly vintage-looking, but ideal for straightened financial times. How hard does Fender find it to strike that balance between preserving its heritage while still pushing forward, we asked? “One of the trickiest things about us marketing and selling any amp is that we have such a broad product line. We have amps that are designed for beginners, all the way up to hand-wired tube Tweed Twins and Vibro-Kings that Clapton and Townshend use. We’re constantly having one foot in the historical Fender thing and one foot in the digital world. So that’s probably our overall message – that we’re successfully able to do both.”
miPRO MARCH 2011 33
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